46 pages • 1 hour read
Jessica KnollLuckiest Girl Alive
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2015A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 13-14Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 13 Summary
As Chapter 13 opens, Ani has just finished filming her account for the documentary. The director is blown away by the gripping honesty and meticulous detailing. The crew is stunned for a moment. Quietly the director asks Ani before she leaves for the day whether she would be willing to meet Dean on camera the next day. Uncertain over the wisdom of such a meeting, she nevertheless agrees.
That night at the hotel she texts Andrew, and the two meet for pizza. She tells him that she is reluctant to expose Dean for what he is. He makes such a perfect victim, the star athlete now wheelchair bound. However, 10 years after the shootings, she knows from hate email she still gets that people believe she was involved in planning the shooting and got away with it, and it continues to bother her: “I care about people believing me” (222). On a whim after dinner, the two drive to the Bradley campus. Finding the athletic center unlocked, they wander the darkened school halls. Even as she tells about knifing Arthur to end the rampage, the two share recollections of Arthur: his intelligence, his savvy way with people he deemed phonies, his unflappable self-confidence, and his quirky humor. It is the most painful part of her memory, Ani admits, that she brought herself to kill him. She then confesses: “I can stab my friend to death but I can’t admit I’m about to marry the wrong guy” (230). Suddenly the two feel pulled to each other. When, during a routine sweep by campus security, the two find shelter against each other, they kiss intensely, but awkwardly. Ani feels more than anything a vast and emptying sadness, thinking of Luke and then about Andrew’s wife and children, “all the hearts invested that would keep us apart” (231).
Chapter 14 Summary
Ani is now at the hospital in the aftermath of the shooting. She is in shock trying to understand what she is being told: seven dead students, including the two shooters, another nine wounded, most amputees as a result of the cafeteria bomb blast. She is uninjured. No one is entirely sure if Ani is a hero who killed one of the shooters or, as rumors have started, she was part of the planning and even shot Dean. She is introduced to Dr. Anita Perkins, a kind of counselor who is also a forensic psychologist. Dr. Perkins homes in on Ani’s relationship with Arthur. In and out of a fog from sedatives, Ani struggles to answer clearly. She thinks: “Twenty-four hours ago I was just a bratty teenager who didn’t want to go to school. It was eighteen hours ago that I discovered what the slimy inside of a brain looks like, what a face looks like without skin and lips and the odd pimple” (242).
Ani is sent home with her parents. The next day, a police detective comes to the house. He asks pointed questions about Ani’s relationship with Dean. Even now, Ani says nothing about the rape. Only later when she is taken to the police station for questioning, joined by a lawyer her father provides, and finds out that Dean has implicated her in the shooting does she finally tell the entire story, including the details of the assault. Dean is telling police that Arthur handed Ani the rifle and instructed her to shoot him, to finish what “they had planned” (279). Ani denies it. The police are not entirely convinced. Her fingers are on the rifle, and they show Ani Arthur’s yearbook in which Ani scrawled hateful things about several of the students who were shot or killed, most damning her inscription above Dean’s photo: “Shoot the cocksucker’s cock off” (264). It seems a bit convenient, the detective says, “[t]hat you’re rid of all the people who caused you so much distress” (264). The police, however, cannot find any hard evidence other than Dean’s testimony to charge Ani.
The family lawyer shares the story with Ani’s parents, and their reaction stuns her. Her mother is particularly snappish as she tells the lawyer: “You don’t have a body like TifAni’s and go to a party with all boys and drink too much and not know exactly what you’re doing there. TifAni knew better. She knows what this family’s values are” (268). At her mother’s insistence, Ani attends the funeral of Liam, one of her rapists. When they are driving home, they are forced off the road by a car carrying a number of Bradley students who were also at the memorial.
Ani understands the depth of the students’ hatred of her, but she returns to the school and finishes there, a pariah. Dean, paralyzed in the shooting, transfers to a boarding school in Switzerland. He later writes an inspirational book that becomes a bestseller and become a famous motivational speaker. On a field trip to New York her junior year, Ani, amid the tumult of hustling young executives swarming the sidewalks on cell phones and drinking designer coffee, feels “concrete and skyscraper wanderlust” and vows the only solution to her life is to get to the city and be successful (268).
Chapters 13-14 Analysis
In these chapters Ani in the narrative present weighs the morality of her decision to meet with the only surviving rapist, Dean, to perhaps compel him to acknowledge his guilt. The admission, she knows, is key to her redemption and has been since the aftermath of the shooting, when Dean framed her without evidence as a co-conspirator. However, Dean seems too heroic, confined to a wheelchair, now a social media celebrity, a motivational speaker with millions of followers, and an author of inspirational self-help books. When Ani arranges to have dinner with Andrew Larson the night she films her piece for the documentary, she wrestles with the implications of using the documentary and the proposed reunion the next day with Dean to expose him “for what he really is” (224). Even though Andrew quickly agrees, saying “no one deserves that honor more than you” (224), Ani is not sure: “A fifteen-year-old who was chased into a classroom and shot in the chest. Something about it sits funny, even with me. I don’t know. Haven’t his parents been through enough?” (224). Andrew disagrees and encourages her to share her story as a way finally to begin to heal. Ani is not sure: “I’m selfish and […] I’m only capable of feeling about things that benefit me” (230). The dinner with Andrew exposes his moral weakness and sycophantic inclinations as he calculates the right thing to say to endear him to Ani.
At this point Ani does not see this side of Andrew, as suggested by the piece of green arugula wedged between his front teeth that she finds absurdly attractive. Even as they kiss awkwardly, if passionately, when they break into Bradley, she knows how many other people—Luke and his family, Andrew’s wife and his children—are reasons for their not getting involved. She needs someone to tell her, as Andrew does, that she does not need Luke Harrison in her life, that being his wife cannot protect her from what she knows she needs to do, and that redemption can come only through confrontation with the man who crippled her emotionally and psychologically. It is time for Ani to heal, and she cannot do by involving herself in Andrew’s marital melodrama.
Appropriately, then, in Chapter 14 Ani is in the hospital recovering after the shooting. Ani at first is in shock and unable to process entirely what the nurses tell her about the carnage that Arthur and Ben caused. She struggles to convince herself of the reality that she “stuck a knife in someone’s chest” (238). The process of healing, however, begins when the police department’s forensic psychiatrist asks questions about Ani’s relationship with Arthur. Ani sees that the questions are meant to unearth evidence that Ani was a co-conspirator. In this story, Ani is determined to help Arthur’s grand plan to blow the school to bits and punish the callous boys and the mean girls who humiliated him and Ben and drove Ben to attempt suicide. The story gains credence when the gravely wounded Dean, from his hospital bed, lies to the police about Arthur and Ani’s conversation at the height of the attack.
The conversation that Dean fabricates clearly implicates Ani, suggesting that Arthur offered her the opportunity to shoot him and even handed her the rifle. Dean claims he has no recollection after that handoff before he was shot at close range in the crotch. Ani’s resistance to telling the police about the rape and her insistence to her mother that she will return to Bradley (she is sure dispatching Arthur will restore her to the cool kids’ clique) reflect her unwillingness to betray her clique. Only when she is brought into the police station with a lawyer and finds herself answering questions about why her fingerprints were on the rifle and why she scribbled threatening messages on Dean’s yearbook picture does she finally tell them about the sexual assault. The decision backfires as the detectives see only a motivation for Ani to have helped in the school attack: “You’re rid of all the people who caused you so much distress” (264).
When Dean corroborates the story by lying about Ani taking the rifle off Arthur, Ani knows she cannot challenge Dean: “No one was going to doubt the popular, six-pack soccer star, paralyzed from the waist down, his promising future wrenched from him at the start of what would have been a charmed life” (286). This epiphany, spurred also by her mother’s disbelief and blame at what happened to her, begins Ani’s calculated life of carefully fashioned lies: “No one ever told the truth, and that was when I started lying too” (276). That epiphany becomes Ani’s life plan when, walking the busy streets of Manhattan, she decides she will recreate herself into the image of the powerful women she watched on the sidewalks. Get there, become that, she decides, and “no one could hurt [her] again” (288). Had the novel ended on that note, it might be taken as a hokey inspirational happy ending. Ani, however, cannot pretend her way to redemption.
